The recovery of off-gases from manufacturing and processing plants can decrease detrimental effects of industry on both the environment and individuals. Moreover, recovered gases can often add value to a process, for instance as a fuel or as a raw material in another process. Various methods have been developed to recover off-gases, including the utilization of scrubbers, combustion methods, membrane separation systems, and the like. For instance, it is known to use supercritical conditions to trap and store carbon dioxide contained in off-gas. Unfortunately, supercritical conditions are energy intensive and expensive, generally leading to a negative return on investment for the carbon dioxide capture. Moreover, supercritical conditions can be hazardous, and danger exists even with expensive safety features in place.
Current understanding of the climate effects caused by release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has led to attempts to store or use recovered carbon dioxide rather than simply release it. Unfortunately, storage of recovered carbon dioxide has also been problematic. For instance, attempts have been made to store recovered carbon dioxide in underground storage, but this requires expensive safety traps and adequate geologic cap lock/seals, which has largely restricted suitable storage reservoirs to oil and gas fields. Moreover, release of carbon dioxide through inadvertent escape remains high from underground storage facilities.
Alternatively, it has been proposed to use above ground processing of recovered carbon dioxide by dissolving the carbon dioxide in brine at a surface facility followed by injection of the saturated brine into groundwater. One such methodology is described in the publication Surface Dissolution: Minimizing Groundwater Impact and Leakage Risk Simultaneously published in Energy Procedia in 2008 and authored by MacMillan Burton and Steven Bryant. Unfortunately, this concept is very capital and energy intensive and requires numerous injection wells.
Accordingly, what are needed in the art are methods and apparatuses that can efficiently recover gases such as carbon dioxide. Moreover, methods and devices that are cost effective and require only low energy input with wide geographic placement potential would be of great benefit.